THOMAS, Edward (author). Margery GILL (illustrator). Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds. London The Bodley Head. 1965

8vo.; publisher’s mauve cloth lettered in gilt to spine, pictorial endpapers, in pictorial dustwrapper; pp. [vi], 7-84; with black and white illustrations by Margery Gill; a fine, uninscribed copy without ownership inscriptions in an all-but-fine, unclipped jacket (18s) with just a little light dusting.

First edition thus, wiih new illustrations by Margery Gill and the addition of a new 3-page Foreword by Helen Thomas, Edward Thomas’s widow.  Edward Thomas’s only children’s book was first published in 1915 in a small edition, only one year before he was tragically killed in the First World War.  The first edition is rare and valuable.

Each of the sixteen short stories here is based on a popular proverb and each is set in a different part of the British countryside, including the Isle of Wight, Hampshire and North Wales.